Heaven's Shadow (14 page)

They were deep into the junction now, a terminus of sorts where the main shaft ended, and at least four passages branched off at different angles. Pogo suddenly disappeared around the right one, leaving Zack alone and, except for his helmet light, in the dark.

“Pogo, you can’t get ahead of me like that—”

Zack found him a few meters into the next passage, frozen in what struck Zack as an awkward posture, his head tilted back as far as it would go in the suit. “Okay,” Zack said, catching his partner and tapping him on the shoulder.

Pogo only said, “Look up there.”

Directly in front of them stood a marker of some kind, a stone plate embedded in the wall of the passage several feet above eye level.

All Zack could say was, “Oh.”

The plate showed a gauzy helix of some kind, monochrome, at least as far as they could tell by their helmet lights. “If you move your head, it changes,” Pogo said. Zack did better than that . . . he actually stepped to one side.

The helix seemed to expand. “It’s 3-D,” he said. He raised his hand, hoping to see it pass through the image, if that was what it was. But he couldn’t reach it.

“It looks like a model of a galaxy,” Pogo said.

This was Zack’s area of expertise, and he knew that current galactic models were less helical and more spherical. But they had changed once in his lifetime; no reason to assume they wouldn’t change again. Besides—

“Is that a marker of some kind?” If you accepted the idea that the 3-D image showed a galaxy, a bright dot was placed halfway between the end of one spiral arm and the fuzzy center.

“Maybe it’s their version of the
Voyager
record.” One of the first deep-space probes back in the 1970s had carried a laser disc filled with music, art, samples of what passed for human culture . . . just on the slim chance some alien intelligence might pick it up.

An alien intelligence that also possessed a laser disc player, which would put them far ahead of anyone on Earth. Zack knew all about the challenges of creating any sort of message that would last hundreds or thousands of years . . . it wasn’t just content, it was delivery system. “Maybe they’re telling us where they came from,” Zack said.

“Who, exactly, is ‘they’ ? ”

They heard voices on the radio—Lucas and Natalia were trying to catch up. “We’re in the right passage,” Zack told them, just as flickering shadows alerted him to their arrival.

They stopped and stared. “Welcome to the next sign,” Pogo said.

Lucas sounded annoyed. “What sign?”

Zack explained, “He just means, the next bit of evidence that we are encountering an alien life-form.”

“Ah, evidence of life-form,” Lucas said. “Not the life-form itself.”

“Not yet,” Pogo said.

“What do you see?” Zack asked the new arrivals.

“It almost looks like DNA helix,” Natalia said.

Now that Zack stood back, he recognized Natalia’s suggestion as a possibility. He had grown up with DNA models that consisted of tiny colored balls arranged in a double helix . . . but suppose a more advanced view was more complex and chaotic? Might a DNA model resemble a galaxy?

“Nah,” Pogo said. “A galaxy makes more sense.”

“To us, maybe,” Zack said. “But if it’s DNA, it might be a way of saying, ‘If this is you, come on in.’” He suddenly wished for direct, real-time communication with Houston and the Home Team.
Wait until they see this—

As Natalia carefully recorded images from every possible angle, Lucas jumped, trying to touch the marker. Top heavy, in low gravity, he really only waved at it, but one thing startled Zack.

He thought he heard a faint scrape as Lucas’s boots reconnected with the pavement.
Sound?
Impossible!

He stomped his own boots on the pavement. All he learned was that it made his feet hurt. “Did anyone hear anything?”

“Why would we be able to hear?” Pogo said.

“Because we have a trace atmosphere,” Natalia said. She was holding a small instrument that reminded Zack of a light meter—a portable barometer! “Still some way to go before it gets as dense as that of Mars, but measurable.”

“Composition?”

“This only shows me pressure.”

“Could it be from the rover?” Rover
Buzz’
s pressurized module would leak some of its air; other pieces of equipment, such as the fuel cells, inevitably emitted gas, too.

“Not unless your rover has a serious leak,” Natalia said. “Even then, I think this space is too large.” She was being kind. A moment’s rough calculation proved to Zack that there was no way the rover’s outgassing—or a dozen rovers’ outgassings—would account for a pressure reading of any kind.

“Hey,” Pogo was saying. “Do you see anything strange on the plate?”

He had moved from spot to spot, experiencing the changing views possible from different angles and heights. “Our marker has been damaged.”

Zack looked closely. The plate behind the 3-D projection appeared to have been partially eaten away, as if splashed with acid. The edges of the damaged area were unexpectedly regular, however. “That’s strange. Someone’s been naughty here.”

“Maybe we aren’t the first to find this sign,” Natalia said.

“You mean we’re looking at
two
alien races?” That was Patrick. “This is getting even cooler!”

“Are we sure we’re even dealing with
one
?” Lucas turned away from the marker, as if it made him nervous.

“Let’s let the experts decide and decipher,” Zack said, not especially eager to give up the lead role—but not wishing to have his team waste time debating when there was clearly more exploration to be done. “It would help if they could see this.”

It took half an hour to restring the cable and bring the camera to the site of the marker. As the startling images traveled at light speed along the cable, back to
Brahma
and
Venture
, and then, two seconds later, to Houston, Bangalore, and the world, Pogo gestured at the high ceiling—higher than a basketball hoop—and broad passage.

“Whoever or whatever they are, they’re big suckers.”

This is so frustrating!!! I used to be able to watch shuttle and
ISS EVAs
minute by minute! How come we’re only seeing a few reports every
couple
of hours?

POSTER UK BEN AT NEOMISSION.COM

Shuttle and station missions used
TDRS
satellites that provided almost constant coverage and communications.
Destiny
and
Venture
rely on their own antennae. Welcome to flight Beyond Earth Orbit, fan boy.

POSTER JIM FROM KSC, SAME SITE

Tea Nowinski’s father had an expression that, unfortunately, perfectly described his daughter’s job during the EVA into Vesuvius Vent. Forced to serve as the link between Zack and Patrick and mission control, she was “the meat in the sandwich.” Squashed, covered in mustard, not a pleasant place to be.

In fact, she also had to serve the same role for Dennis Chertok and his commander aboard
Brahma
. For the past four hours, all she had done was flip switches to change frequencies on the radio, back and forth from the direct link to Zack and Patrick, and at times Lucas and Natalia, then another channel to Houston (formerly Weldon, now the Stay-2 shift director Josh Kennedy), then a third channel to Taj in
Brahma
.

All the while watching the startling imagery that flickered on the small screen on
Venture’
s control panel: the view from the bottom of Vesuvius Vent; the pavement; the cleft; the dark, forbidding passage.

The
marker
.

Maybe it was better that she was so busy, or she would have been paralyzed at the implications . . . that she and Yvonne and Dennis and
Venture
and Taj and
Brahma
were sitting not on the icy/rocky surface of a Near-Earth Object, but on the hull of a giant interstellar spacecraft.

And possibly a few kilometers—or meters!—from its crew!

She was only able to hear fragments of the reaction in Houston, the automatic use of the stoic word
copy
to acknowledge the latest bombshell, broken by Kennedy’s occasional honest blurt of “Wow” or “Oh man.”

What was going on with the Home Team? For that matter, what was her father thinking, back home in Woodland Hills?

What was really going through Zack’s mind a kilometer from here?

She wanted to be dealing with those matters, not feeding Yvonne Hall and checking her dressing, or searching out bandages and medical gear and food and water for Chertok, all the while struggling with the question of what the cosmonaut was seeing, and whether he should see it.

Her immediate goal now, at EVA plus four hours, was to get Dennis out of
Venture
.

Yvonne rested in a hammock stretched across the rear of the
Venture
cabin at nose height. There was another set of attach points even higher up—it was where Yvonne was originally supposed to sleep. (
Venture’
s main cabin was taller—four meters in height—than it was wide, a design necessitated by its dual use as a vehicle capable of lifting off a planetary surface. In lunar gravity, there was no danger in falling out of a hammock eight feet off the ground.) But that would have put her out of reach. Even so, Dennis had had to stand on a stool to perform his basic surgery.

“I have done all I can do,” Dennis announced. “She will be stable for at least a day. In this gravity, possibly more. But my professional recommendation is that you return her to Earth at first opportunity.” He smiled to show that he was aware of the political and operational challenges of that decision.

“I’ll tell Houston.”

He indicated the airlock. “I will need some help suiting up.”

“Get started and I’ll be right with you.” As the cosmonaut slipped through the hatch into the next chamber, Tea climbed the stool to have a look at Yvonne. “How’re you feeling?”

“About like you’d expect.”

Tea had conflicting views of her fellow astronaut. She had known Yvonne for a decade—had actually served as the astronaut in charge of training Yvonne’s group of candidates, so she had seen the young engineer’s baby steps into the program. She had proved to be middle-of-the-pack in most regards . . . she lacked the operational strengths of some of her colleagues—those who had come to NASA from military units—and sometimes let her temper show.

But it turned out that she possessed astounding physical skills and a long-distance runner’s stamina (Yvonne ran marathons) as well as terrific eye-hand coordination that made her everyone’s choice for both remote manipulator work and EVAs, those being the two primary skill sets needed for station and lunar missions.

She wasn’t just a jock, either; Yvonne turned out to be uncommonly levelheaded about the social aspects of being an astronaut, unlike a few of her fellow candidates, who fell into the usual trap of thinking they were the space world’s equivalent of rock stars.

Tea had, of course, known that Yvonne was Gabriel Jones’s daughter from a failed first marriage. Growing up in and around NASA had probably cured Yvonne of any illusions about the special nature of astronauts. At the time Yvonne joined the office, her father was actually in Washington at HQ, deputy associate administrator for exploration, one of the folks charged with developing and managing missions to the Moon . . . and to Near-Earth Objects. Jones’s appointment as JSC director had no immediate effect on Yvonne’s career. There was also some sniping about who got assigned to a flight crew—by anyone who didn’t get assigned; any reason would do.

(Tea could only imagine what snarky comments were zipping around Building 4-South when her lover, Zack Stewart, was not only placed on her crew, but given her command!)

Destiny-7
had originally been Tea’s mission, and she had not only approved Yvonne’s assignment, she had asked for her.

And now, having seen Yvonne’s accident, having had to deal with its aftermath, she wondered if she’d made the right choice.

Yvonne had made no obvious mistake, it was true—but she had demonstrated one fatal flaw:

She was
unlucky
.

“Can I get you anything?” Tea hoped Yvonne could drink on her own . . . “Do you want your father back on the line?”

“God, no.” The injured astronaut shifted in the hammock, moaned. “Just get me my PPK,” she said.

Tea wondered briefly why Yvonne wanted to share the hammock with a big silver briefcase, but if it made her happy—and quiet—she was all for it. “Coming right up.”

“Shut up, Jason. The only thing we’ve learned from dealing with aliens is that they can’t be trusted.”

“So you’re suggesting we can only fight them.”

“Well, we could
surrender
, which is obviously your preference. But I like mine better.”

EXTRACT FROM
STARSHIP “KILROY WAS HERE,”
A SCI-FI NOVEL BY WADE WILLIAMS (1999)

“So this is the famous Vault.”

Harley Drake rolled his chair through the doorway. He had been summoned out of the Home Team by Weldon, who introduced him to a tall, gangly, almost goofy-looking man of forty in a short-sleeved white shirt and several badges. “Brent Bynum,” Weldon said, “National Security Staff, our White House liaison.” Bynum said nothing, offering only a slight nod of the head.

Weldon led this short parade to the back side of Building 30, to a door that said
ELECTRICAL
.

And proved to lead to a spacious closet with a pair of ancient mainframes stacked floor to ceiling, and just enough room to reach another door . . . that led to a conference room beyond.

Weldon flipped on the lights. “We’re getting a lot of use out of it this month.”

Harley was surprised at how cool the room was, as if it had superstrength air-conditioning. “Is this little exercise going to be worth my time? Because you may have noticed that we have a crew wandering around loose on an alien spaceship.”